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There was no sound, only a faint rocking of the screen as the 110-pound missile dropped from the UAV. A green light confirmed release. Another, ignition.
"Payload away, Texas Center. Three Nine Seven."
"Roger." In the most bland of tones.
There was nothing more for Shales to do now, except watch the safe house disappear in a flash of flame and wash of smoke. He turned to the video.
And he saw the back door to the house open and two people exit into the courtyard between the house and garage. Rashid was one of them. A teenage boy was the other. They spoke briefly and began to kick around a soccer ball.
CHAPTER 70
BARRY SHALES FELT THE SHOCK like a physical blow.
He cracked a thumbnail jamming the digit into the red button in the middle of the weapons control panel labeled simply STOP.
This sent a signal disarming the warhead in the Hellfire. But the missile was still a deadly mass of metal and propellant, streaking at nine hundred miles an hour toward a building with less-than-perfect accuracy. It could easily kill everyone inside even if the explosives didn't detonate.
Shales pressed the autopilot button for the drone itself and overrode the automatic guidance for the missile, taking control of the Hellfire with a small trackball on the weapons panel.
A camera rested in the nose of the missile, not far from the high-explosive payload, but at this speed and with the marginal resolution of the lens you couldn't fly the projectile very accurately. Shales had to rely on the radar in the drone and a feed from Mexican air traffic control to steer the deadly cylinder away from the safe house.
He glanced at the monitor to the right--the drone's camera, which was still pointed toward the soccer players. He noted Rashid pause and look up to the sky. Squint. He would have heard something, seen a glint perhaps.
The teenage boy, about to kick the dusty ball, paused too, regarding the Arab cautiously.
Behind them, Barry Shales could see, a small girl appeared and stood in the doorway of the safe house. She was smiling.
"Texas Center to Three Nine Seven, we read payload path deviation. Please advise."
Shales ignored the transmission and concentrated on trying to steer the Hellfire, twice as fast as any jetliner, away from populated areas in the target zone. It wasn't easy. This part of Reynosa wasn't as dense as to the east but there were still plenty of homes and businesses and traffic. The radar gave a clear image of airliners nearby, which Shales could steer clear of, but the system didn't reveal what was on the ground--and that was where he needed to crash the missile. And pretty damn fast; soon the propellant would be expended and he'd lose control.
"Three Nine Seven? Do you copy?"
Then on the small screen revealing what the nose camera in the missile was viewing, the image faded as it headed into overcast. He was flying blind.
"Jesus Lord..."
Words that Barry Shales, who attended church every Sunday with his wife and young sons, did not use lightly.
"Three Nine Seven, this is Texas Center. Please advise."
He thought angrily: I'm advising you to go fuck yourself.
The haze broke for a moment and he saw that the missile was heading right for a residential development.
No, no...
A tweak of the trackball changing the course farther west.
The haze closed in again.
A glance at the radar. The terrain was mapped out but it wasn't a satellite image, merely a traditional map, and gave no clue as to what was on the ground ahead of the Hellfire.
Only seconds remained until the propellant was gone and the deadly tube would come to earth. But where? In a child's bedroom, in a hospital, in a packed office building?
Then an idea occurred to Shales. Releasing the missile trackball for a moment, he typed fast on the computer keyboard in front of him.
In the information monitor in the upper left-hand corner, Firefox popped up. This was completely against procedure. You couldn't go online with a commercial browser in a GCS while a drone was operational. But Shales could think of no other option. In an instant he'd called up Google Maps and clicked on satellite view. A photo image of the ground around Reynosa popped up, houses, foliage, roads, stores.
